Sure why not add NIS server, why stop there though lets add DNS too. Hey these things are so reliable, let's put a full blown kernel in there, and start running user apps as well. Anyone ever hear of a little box called Auspex??? I actually thought the concept of "dedicated" NFS appliance was a good one.

Jeff

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We are looking into ways of improving the NIS implementation to be more efficient. We are not planning on implementing the slave functionality

on

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the filer though.

That's too bad, because it essentially makes a network less robust. See, if you rely on NIS files so you don't have to copy files to the filer locally, then lets say you have a power outage. The filer comes up and then can't do anything because it's waiting to talk to the NIS server (it's probably the DNS server too). The NIS server can't do anything because it's waiting to mount the filer. Stalemate. There are ways around this, like having your NIS/DNS server hold the data on a local disk, but then you have a kink in your whole centralized network storage scheme. Altenatively, you can copy everything to the filer, but then you've defeated the whole purpose of NIS.

Making filers slave servers is an ideal solution. You don't have to allow other clients to bind to them, but this way they can get data updated from a master and still have a local copy in the event of network problems.

Bruce

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